


Little are the things we learn

by nearperfectthing



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: Character sketches, if ronan can finish his book i can finish this freaking story, mentions of all irl relationships, mentions of irl family members of whom I know nothing about
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-24 06:18:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,334
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20353771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nearperfectthing/pseuds/nearperfectthing
Summary: "When Jon started Crooked, Emily understood. This was his way of doing something good."Six character sketches of our three protagonists and the co-parents of their dogs





	Little are the things we learn

**Author's Note:**

> These are, of course, entirely my projections onto the names of real people. Keep it secret, keep it safe, etc, etc. Title is from The Tallest Man on Earth's "Timothy" (little are the things we learn / but we're making sound / Timothy we're waking up / to a healing mind) for no other reason except that I like it. Hope you enjoy!

01.

Tommy liked Iowa because the people really were that nice. They were so nice to him, so welcoming, and when he messed up, said something not quite right, he would crack a joke. _I’m from Boston_, he’d say, _we don’t really have manners up there, you know_. And they would laugh. It was a good trial run, because two years later, he wouldn’t be able to afford to say something not quite right.

Tommy was never jealous of the way Jon rose so fast through the ranks of the campaign, the administration. He was never jealous of the prestige or the salary that came with it. He was jealous of the _team_. Speechwriting, Tommy knows, is a group activity. Not unlike writing for a TV show, Lovett tells him sometimes. Now, sometimes, when they’re laughing, nostalgic, about those speeches, they can’t always remember who came up with which clever turn of phrase, who wrote what impassioned ending. That’s what makes Tommy jealous. Sure, he was on a team too. He had people above him, people below him. But standing at that podium, with the seal of the White House, the seal of the NSC behind you, you’re alone.

It’s crazy to miss campaign life. Campaign life is crazy. Campaign life is three identical cities in the same day, blurring together, bland food, never the same bed two nights in a row. But campaign life is communal. Campaign life is you and your team, working towards the same, impossible goal. Campaign life is carefully structured and the stakes are high and the reward is so, so sweet. Campaigning, the comedians say, is much more fun than governing. Sometimes, Tommy misses Iowa.

There’s other ways to be a part of a team, even with work is so deadly alone. In those darkest few months, in his last year in the administration, when the confidential information he has threatens to overrun him and spill out, but he has to keep it in, has to keep it for himself, he’s a one man show, Tommy is. He sinks into his new team, his team at home, the him-and-Hanna team, eating take-out Thai food several hours too late to be a real dinner, because Tommy had to stay extra at work again, loving this time when he’s a part of a whole. Some mornings, he resents having to go into work. That’s when he knows he has to get out.

And when Favs and Lovett ask him, for real, to move to LA, he knows he’s going to say yes. His best friends want him, him-and-Hanna, to be a part of a new team. And Tommy goes.

02.

When Jon was fifteen, he biked the two and a half miles from his house to the Syosset station of the Long Island Rail Road. He locked his bike in the back, hoping not to run into anyone he knew. Normally, he would have gotten a ride to the station. Normally, he never would have taken the LIRR into the city at all, but he wasn’t going to risk being asked any questions by nosy parents with cars. Jon sat on the train for more than an hour as it wound its way slowly into the city. It was a sunny Saturday in June, 1997, and Jon went to New York Pride for the first time.

Everything that day was in the extreme. It was so sunny, Jon remembers squinting under the brim of a Mets cap, worrying that it made him look straight. It was loud, it was colorful and frantic, like Coney Island in the middle of the summer, there were mardis gras beads everywhere, men wearing almost nothing, Jon remembers being afraid to look, being afraid to look away.

The whole parade passed him by, that day, like a blink of an eye. He remembers thinking, _ten years from now, I could be any of these men_. Thinking, _one day I will come back, and I will march in this parade_. Thinking, _one day, I’m going to kiss a boy_.

Someone standing on the top of a float threw a condom, hitting Jon in the chest. He caught it, out of reflex, but what the hell was he going to do with a condom? Awkwardly, blushing, he handed it to the man next to him, barely making eye contact. The man grinned, laughed, and gave him a little _thanks!_ and a salute, igniting something warm in Jon’s chest. The feeling of being in on the joke.

It was that feeling of warmth, like sun that hits you all the way down to your bones, that Jon was chasing when he went to LA, that on his best of days, he can feel beating through the ceiling of the Crooked offices, when he’s surrounded by his best friends and everyone is laughing at his jokes.

That afternoon, Jon made his way slowly out through the crowd. The streets around him had more traffic than he had ever seen, even in the middle of the city (_like driving to Passover in Westchester_, his mom would have said) and it took him longer than he expected to get back to the train station, back to his bike, back home. His mom was reheating dinner, calling out hello, but Jon ran up to his room before she could ask any questions. Closed the door. Looked at himself in the full length mirror, t-shirt and shorts and baseball cap and one single strand of mardis gras beads stuffed in his back pocket. He scowled at his reflection. _You’re gay_, he told it, matter of factly, almost accusatorially. _You’re gay, you idiot_.

He went to New York pride half a dozen times after, to Pride in LA and DC and once in Sweden. And then twenty years after that first time, back downtown in New York, almost as awe-inspiringly chaotic as he remembers it. He smiles, wide, and Ronan, hanging onto his wrist so that they don’t lose each other in the chaos, notes with typical matter of factness, _you’re happy_. Jon turns to look at him, still grinning. _Yeah, you idiot. I’m gay_.

03.

Hanna, maybe, didn’t think through what it would be like to date someone famous. But it’s hard to understand Tommy as _famous_, really. _Niche-famous_, he says, _like a mediocre local punk band_, when he’s making fun of himself, which is always. Tommy isn’t famous, and Hanna certainly isn’t. But every once in a while, she’s reminded that Tommy is _known_.

She goes to the live shows, sometimes, and tries to ignore people who know who she is. They’re polite, mostly, smile and don’t come up to her, let her sit quietly, sometimes close her eyes and pretend she’s in Jon and Emily’s living room, listening to the boys talk shit, like she could interrupt at any moment.

Sometimes, people recognize him on the streets. It’s less common, but getting more so. Tommy’s tall, and he holds himself so straight, people notice him anyway. She can tell when they know who he is, something about the way their eyes change. Tommy doesn’t love it either, she knows, because he tells her straight out. For all his joking about his repressed New England-ness, Tommy has always been honest with Hanna. It’s one of her favorite things about him. But Tommy also takes this strangeness with a strain of pride, which Hanna understands. She’s proud of him too. But the way people look at Tommy sometimes, like they know him, it leaves a bad taste in her mouth.

When Hanna was in elementary school, a girl two years older had left, half way through fourth grade, moved to Los Angeles and become a child actor. For years, everyone at Hanna’s school had talked about their tenuous connection to stardom. Even then, Hanna had thought it sounded miserable. When that girl came back home, just at the end of high school, Hanna was pretty sure she understood why this girl kept her head down, got her GED, and never said a word about her years in LA. It’s one thing to be on TV, it’s a whole other thing to take that fame home. It went like this: Hanna was proud of Tommy, of course. But he didn’t need to bring the sort of attention he got on twitter into the space between them.

She goes home and tries to forget about it. She picks up her book (Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas, which she’s started and stopped no fewer than three times) and she thinks about the Tommy who sits next to her on the couch, who likes old black and white movies but would never admit it (too predictable), and splits a bag of veggie chips from Trader Joe’s to pretend to be healthy, and how no number of retweets will ever let a stranger knows what it feels like to have him lean against her shoulder.

It was almost more fun, actually. To be a little removed from it all, to listen to the podcasts, hear Tommy passing off her fascination with whales as his own, just the boys talking shit in Emily and Jon’s living room, she could interrupt them any time.

04.

Jon had talent, young. Jon was always smart, always going to be great. He was the kind of kid that the adults around him were proud of, told him he was doing well and how he could do better. His parents, his teachers. And then the campaign, which in some ways, was kind of like going back to school. Sure, in school, Jon had never gotten so many edits. Naturally gifted, naturally talented, that was Jon, which didn’t go half as far on a presidential campaign (a presidential campaign!). He had to get better, constantly. It as terrifying, frustrating, sometimes embarrassing, but when he heard his words come from a debate stage, a raised platform in Des Moines, the steps of the capitol, well, it was everything.

The writing process itself, in those years, became kind of rote. Not boring, never boring, but predictable. First the campaign, then the white house (the white house!), he wrote, he got notes, he rewrote, he listened as his words were given the power of the president. There was something almost simplistic about the process. When Jon was told to change something, he had to change it. He could argue for his wording, his framing, his ideas, but it wasn’t fundamentally his choice. Sometimes Jon made the wrong decision, wrote the wrong words. But when he didn’t, it was only because someone else had allowed him to.

Those first few months at Crooked, those were the most terrifying months of Jon’s professional career. He had a platform, but the words were coming from his own name, his own voice, no one to tell him he was wrong. Of course, Tommy and Lovett could give him advice, they told their new staffers a thousand times that they could too, but it was different. Jon had to be the one to decide whether the advice was good or bad. No boss, no professor, no president of the United States. Sometimes it felt like baring his soul to the whole world, letting everyone know what he thought. Especially when he really did say something wrong, pick a fight he was on the wrong side of.

(No one to save him from himself, or worse, save their company from him. What if he ruined everything. What if it never got off the ground. What if it all fell apart because Jon was too confident, too arrogant, not humble enough. Jon grew up religious, which was mostly a good thing. Sometimes, though, those years of Catholic education had him doubting every thing he’d ever wanted.)

Once, late at night, unable to sleep, trying to blame the anxiety on an upcoming cross-country flight but knowing it was more than that, Jon told Emily,_ I just don’t know if I know how to make decisions on my own_. Emily, only half awake, had responded, _what about the time you decided to move to LA and then told me about it a week later_. Which okay, was sort of true, but also several years in the past and mostly just a joke that Emily told. And, Jon thought, it was a bad example. Jon had moved to LA because Lovett lived there, because Andy lived there, because he liked the idea of being able to go to the beach. He had stayed because, well, Lovett had been there, and Andy had been there, and Emily had agreed to come, and it turned out he liked the beach. He tried to explain this to Emily, pretty sure he wasn’t making any sense. If he’d turned this speech into the campaign, it would have come back with a thousand notes in red pen. He had no one to turn it into, anymore.

Emily said, _so ask for help_, Jon and then watched him for a few moments in silence, as he processed what she had said. And then she fell back asleep. And so Jon went and made decisions. And sometimes he made the wrong ones. Sometimes on his own, sometimes with the full and misplaced support of his friends. And then he and Emily would go out and eat pancakes for dinner, he would ask her opinion and she would give it, and then he would try again the next day.

05.

When Ronan was a kid, a friend of his, an older friend, the daughter of a producer, had told him, if you’re the child of someone famous, and you’re ambitious, the most you can ever hope for is to put space between your name and your parents. Ronan’s wikipedia page has three descriptions between his name and his mother’s name, and he fought for every one of them.

Ronan is acutely aware of how people understand him. He’s always known what role he’s been cast into, even if he sometimes struggles to play it. He’s smart, charming, but never had the talent for acting. When he publicly flubs his line, he is always his own judge.

There are so few times that he can stop being that person, that person who holds themselves with such understanding of who they are, who they’re expected to be. Ronan has older siblings, who are fiercely protective. He has younger siblings, who are fiercely loving. They don’t expect anything from him other than an encyclopedic memory for facts about alpine goats. He wanted to expand this circle, but it was always hard to trust. To know whether a person wanted the real him, or a garish image from an old tabloid magazine. He held himself back, wrapped himself in his own last name and didn’t trust the outside.

He can see himself in the third person, all the people that he’s been, that he’s given up on being: little Satchel, who grew up ducking from cameras, a worn copy of National Geographic clutched in one small fist. _Precocious_, his mother always said. _Obnoxious_, Ronan thinks, in retrospect, but with a warmth towards that small boy who never shut up about pokemon or insect life cycles or whatever had just caught his attention. Seamus, who had no friends his own age, getting driven to and from campus every day, nerdy wire-framed glasses slipping down his nose, a blockade of books between him and the flash of a camera. Ronan had gotten tired of being those people. He had moved on.

Ronan wouldn’t change his name now. He couldn’t anyway, not professionally. But more than that. He can look back at his past selves with fondness, but only _Ronan_ sparks pride. Ronan went to law school, Ronan was a diplomat. Ronan is a journalist with a name that people recognize, people respect, some people, somewhere, even fear. Ronan works hard, and wins awards, and never quite disconnects from work anymore, his mother puts a hand on his cheek, tilting his face to look her in the eye, and says, _you worry too much. I know_, he says, _I do it just to bother you._ Ronan met Jon.

Ronan at twenty-three was self-serious, contained, wary of strange men. Ronan at twenty-three didn’t think he could show himself to anyone, no matter how much he liked the way Jon’s whole face lit up with a laugh, whole body folded in half with the joke.

_Effortlessly charming_, Emily described him once, early on, teasing. _He tries really hard, actually_, Jon had said. Jonathan, who knew him too well to take him seriously. That was the moment Ronan knew he was in love.

06.

The truth is, Emily got the job with Sherron Brown because of a connection. She was plenty smart, plenty capable, and plenty enthusiastic. She kept the job on her own merits. But she got the job on her connections. Her dad would say, take your connections, use them for good. Emily loves her dad. She loves Ohio. She loves to do good. So she took the job.

The job was how she met Jon, but more importantly, the job was how she learned to be an adult. Jon never quite understood, because Jon worked too hard, in those days, didn’t know anyone outside of government. Emily learned what it felt like to have a salary, to spend it, sometimes stupidly, on dinners you can’t afford, just for the sake of eating outside with your friends. Emily was a smart, practical girl who took a job as a senate staffer because she believed she could help make the world a better place. But working on the hill, Emily also learned to be a little bit stupid. To have fun for the sake of fun. Which was good, because smart, practical Emily never would have thought to herself, _what’s the harm in a fling with a handsome white house staffer?_

Of course, it didn’t turn out to be a fling.

Her parents didn’t warn her against it, because they trusted her, as an adult. But she knew they worried about her, barely out of college, on her own and falling for a high-powered man. They told her, _just don’t forget about what you want_. Emily wanted to have fun. She wanted to get a too expensive dinner with her friends. She wanted to make the world a better place. Emily was still smart, practical, and she knew she could multitask.

Emily was too polite to tell her parents _I told you so_. That first time she took Jon home, she didn’t tell him her parents had ever doubted him, didn’t tell her parents she remembered their worries. She and Jon had been together four months, and Emily could see something serious, settled in him. He wasn’t going to walk away from this.

Her parents loved him. Of course they loved him, Jon was good to the core. Jon wanted to do good in the world. They drank lemonade on the porch in Maine, watched the waves hit the beach, talked about lobster rolls and then politics and then lobster rolls again.

When Jon started Crooked, Emily understood. This was his way of doing something good. And she would do whatever she could to help, because she believed in the mission, believed in Jon, believed in helping where you can. Sometimes, it feels like it takes over their lives. Certainly takes over their home. Sometimes, Jon is on the road, filling theaters while she stays at home with the dog, and she misses him. Sometimes, she packs her world into a suitcase and follows him, meets important people and tells them the things that matter to her. Sure, it’s a connection, but she’s going to use it.

Emily is smart, practical. She follows Jon to LA but she doesn’t give up her job. She picks her spots to do good in the world, and she gets to work.


End file.
